As fourth block comes to a close each day, and students begin to get hungry, a white van from Mama’s Pizza Express, a local full-service restaurant, pulls up the front door and unloads warming bags full of school lunches. Prepared offsite, these bags contain the hot lunches that feed every student across all four grades who have pre-ordered a meal for that day.
Each meal finds its way to a student. Volunteers unpack them and match them up with a meal order list. When the lunch bell rings, students line up to receive their meals.
Hot lunches at the Community School of Davidson (CSD) High School are a well-known and very popular option for students in every grade. Choices range from salads to pizza and much more.
Every option for students is a good one, but the real question is what makes them different from normal school lunches in a cafeteria?
Price per meal is an important consideration. Costing $7 for each meal, students place monthly hot lunch orders ahead of time and get to pick what they want on whatever day they want it.
Menu choices are also important. Some days have orders that are not as popular, which means fewer students order on that specific day. Other days, such as pizza Friday, students order in larger numbers. It’s easy to tell when it’s a pizza Friday because the lunch line is long.
However, it’s not always about pizza. Arthur Tarleton (‘28) believes that the cheeseburgers are the best item on the menu.
“My favorite thing is probably the cheeseburgers because they taste good most of the time,” Arthur Tarleton said.
Making sure to get orders submitted electronically each month is always important, as well. CSD admin usually sends out orders one or two weeks before the next month, which gives students plenty of time to pick their favorite before a deadline. If families try to order past the deadline, it will be too late, and students become limited, or will not have any orders for the month.
Some days, free snacks are available at pickup, too.
These often include goldfish, apple slices, mini carrots, cheese sticks, etc. All are great options to eat with lunch on any given day.
Leftovers happen when a student who has ordered a meal either forgets to pick it up or is absent. For anyone who might want more lunch or didn’t have one, extra hot lunches are provided at the front of the school when 5th block ends. Getting there early, before they are gone, is helpful because these free extras usually run out quickly.
Pickups are fast and convenient. Unlike a normal cafeteria, all CSD students have to do is get in line, say their name and grade, and then grab their food that they ordered the month before.
A normal high school differs on many levels. Eating at a traditional cafeteria usually includes moving down the line and grabbing food and something to drink. The food is usually bland, tastes funny, looks weird, whatever it may be. That’s what makes lunch at CSD different. It’s not what you would expect lunch at school to be like.
Nancy Ellington, CSD’s hot lunch coordinator, believes that CSD’s food choices and process is unique.
“I feel like CSD hot lunches are better than average cafeteria lunches because you get your choice of freshly made lunches delivered to you from a local restaurant. You choose what you want and it’s delivered to you,” Nancy Ellington said.
The food is much different than a cafeteria lunch in the sense that it all tastes good and is fresh. Normal cafeteria food sits out for a while and doesn’t have much flavor to it. Hot lunch at CSD is delivered prior to the 30 minutes of lunch that students have to eat, meaning that it is fresh and ready to be eaten.
CSD school lunches are much different from your average school lunch. That’s what makes it stand out, it’s not a typical school lunch, it’s something different, newer and more personal.
